Well, after an unsuccesful try at making a live, bootable USB with UNetbootin(it kind of worked but not quite) I finally just gave Startup Disk Creator a try in my Ubuntu 12.04.2 tool box and low and behold, it works like a charm. I've got Peppermint One on an 8GB USB and it runs great, I have Linux Mint 13 Xfce on a 32GB USB and it's doing fine(in fact I'm using it right now) and I even put Damnsmall Linux on a 256MB(the program is only 50MB) and it actually runs. This is really cool getting to try out different flavours of Linux without having to take Ubuntu off of my hard drive.
I've never like Windows OS, I loved my Mac OS X but couldn't afford a new iMac after my 11 year old iMac finally died from a lighting strike but I think I can live happily with Linux. It does all the things I want including shrug off viruses and other junk on the interweb and it's just as intutive as OS X was for me.
Yep, I think I'm on my way to becoming a Linux Geek.
